This invention in general relates to wireless communications and specifically relates to a method and system for audio conferencing amongst a plurality of Bluetooth enabled terminal units using a Bluetooth enabled audio gateway.
Typically in the current art of Bluetooth communication, a limited number of devices may communicate with each other synchronously. The current implementation of the Bluetooth standards allows a Bluetooth device to interconnect with up to seven devices. However, there may be situations where the Bluetooth standards need to support communication amongst a plurality of Bluetooth devices. Exemplarily, consider a family or a group of friends desiring to communicate with each other in a public place like an airport or a hotel lounge. The family or the group of friends may want to participate in a cellular network based call using their Bluetooth headsets instead of using the speaker phone of the mobile handset. The alternative of using individual handsets to join the group call over a cellular network may be both inconvenient and expensive. As another example consider an office environment where tens of participants may need to participate in a single audio conferencing session using Bluetooth communication. Though Bluetooth communication devices may be convenient and useful in such situations, the current methods of Bluetooth communication may not effectively support such a scale of participation.
The Bluetooth standard specifies multiple types of Bluetooth bearer channels such as synchronous connection oriented (SCO) channel, extended synchronous connection oriented (eSCO) channel, etc for transporting voice between a master Bluetooth device and a slave Bluetooth device. However, these transport mechanisms may not efficiently support broadcasting the voice data to multiple slave devices. Existing methods of Bluetooth communication may not permit broadcasting of synchronous audio data to multiple slave devices and may not be reliable in delivering voice data from one of the slave devices to the master device. For example, a Bluetooth piconet may allow a maximum of eight devices, to be addressable using the logical transport address (LT-ADDR) field of the Bluetooth packet headers.
Some of the existing methods of using Bluetooth communication amongst a plurality of participants rely on explicit repeaters that may consume bandwidth and may not be scalable to larger number of participants. To accommodate multiple terminals or slave devices in a conferencing session, the master device may have to space out the SCO/eSCO channels between distinct slave devices. In addition, the master device may have to buffer and repeat the voice samples from an external voice network in each of the synchronous channels. Similarly, the master device needs to mix or select the voice samples that may be coming over the Bluetooth link from one or more slave devices and send the voice samples out to the voice network. This method of explicitly multiplexing and demultiplexing multiple synchronous links may not be scalable. For example, using a 64 kbps bidirectional SCO link for each terminal will limit the theoretical maximum number of terminals to three. Practically the limit of the number of terminals may be just two, due to the bandwidth needed for control signaling.
Hence, there is an unmet need for a local conferencing system using Bluetooth enabled devices, and a method of communication between the plurality of Bluetooth enabled devices that is efficient, scalable and involves minimum bandwidth consumption.